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Many of your clients come to you in acute distress, unable to live the lives they want. You offer them a lifeline by accepting them into treatment. You take the time to get to know them through the assessment process. You design a specialized plan of care for them, taking into consideration their individual needs. You help them every step of the way, and now that they are ready for discharge, it seems that your relationship with them has reached its natural end.
Rather than parting ways with a client you have invested so much attention, time, and care in, you can benefit by maintaining that connection through alumni tracking. While this might sound like some sort of compliance and monitoring, it is a new stage in the relationship with clients rather than a continuation of treatment. Maintaining a positive relationship with former clients even after they have moved on from treatment can benefit everyone involved.
How Lightning Step Technologies Helps With Alumni Tracking
Lightning Step Technologies makes the alumni tracking process seamless with our All-In-One system. We offer a combined CRM (Customer Relation Management), EMR (Electronic Medical Records), and RCM (Revenue Cycle Management). Rather than storing data in separate places with their own interfaces to learn and keep track of, a client’s entire narrative of care will be conveniently accessible in one user-friendly place.
This doesn’t just apply to their medical records and treatment history but also any contact with your organization since they began treatment. Our comprehensive and customizable solution can easily be scaled to keep detailed records of every client and follow them from pre-admissions through discharge and beyond.
Integration With Third-Party Vendors
In addition to integrating with your favorite external vendors like Salesforce and Twilio, Lightning Step can connect with CaredFor, an alumni engagement application. If your organization decides to participate, a single click can connect clients to this service at discharge.
On the alumni side, the app functions like a private social network, allowing users to interact with other alumni of your treatment programs and share common successes, struggles, and support with one another. On your end, you can access helpful metrics such as alumni engagement with the service, who is thriving in recovery, and who might be at increased risk of a relapse.
This app also lets you send out polls and surveys to collect relevant information for marketing and other purposes. On top of all this, CaredFor, through Lightning Step, automatically builds a profile for clients and invites them to the service, so your level of engagement with the service is up to you, as there is no need to provide access to every client manually.
With this capability in front of you, you might still wonder why you should invest in alumni tracking, especially since you have many current and future clients to focus on. The benefits are numerous, and many of them are spurred not by continually investing significant time and resources but by simply sustaining a client relationship you have already built a strong foundation for.
Success Stories
When you discharge a client, you can be confident in the resources you gave them and the positive trajectory you set them on, but you can never know what will happen in the coming weeks, months, and years. You can only hope that alumni will continue to use the tools you gave them and maintain recovery.
Tracking alumni success through resources like CaredFor can give you a more concrete understanding of how your alumni fare after leaving treatment. When alumni are thriving and maintaining recovery in a way that shows how significantly your treatment has transformed their life, it can benefit you to inquire about highlighting them as a success story for marketing purposes.
While advertising your breadth and depth of services, the training of your staff and the scientific evidence behind what you do can invite potential clients to investigate your services, having specific people your services have benefited that you can point to can go far in attracting clients. When people are in acute psychological distress, it can be challenging to see a way out of the darkness, and feeling alone in that struggle exacerbates this helplessness. Seeing a person in a similar place who went on to thrive after seeking treatment can provide the hope and inspiration needed to reach out to your organization for help.
Feedback on Treatment
Just as identifying alumni who are thriving can help your organization reach more people, learning about those who are struggling can provide just as much insight. By seeing what alumni are sharing about their progress since treatment, you have access to a wealth of information about what your program excels in and the areas where additional support could be added.
In addition to observation, administering polls and surveys is an explicit manner of acquiring candid feedback on what aspects of treatment have benefited alumni the most and the gaps that could be filled to better support sustained recovery and prevent relapse. By analyzing these patterns, your and your team can make client-informed and evidence-based decisions about what works and what could be improved in your treatment offerings.
Expanding Your Reach
By continuing to support your alumni and keeping them engaged with your organization, you open the door to new referrals. A happy former client might be more likely to share their positive experience with the people in their life. If they know someone who is struggling with substance abuse or mental health, your treatment center will be at the forefront of their mind, leading them to recommend you as a source for help. This is a uniquely powerful and authentic form of marketing.
